Month: January 2018

Review: Inside the Wave

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On 30th January at the Costa Book Awards, Helen Dunmore’s collection Inside the Wave posthumously won Book of the Year 2017. As only the second person to posthumously receive this prize, the award was received by Helen’s husband Frank Charnley and their two children Patrick and Tess. Inside the Wave reflects on the poet’s cancer diagnosis and looming death with immense honesty and bravery. Including poems that range from heartbreaking to humorous, the whole collection is a meditation on mortality with … Read more

T. S. Eliot Prize Winner Announcement

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Night Sky with Exit Wounds by Ocean Vuong Front Cover

On 14th January 2018, the T. S. Eliot Prize Winner was announced. Ocean Vuong’s astounding debut collection, Night Sky with Exit Wounds, traces the aftermath of war across generations. In a video about his collection he says “a lot of the poems in the collection attempt to navigate history through a rewriting, or rather a recasting, of history into a mythology”. Vuong is the first literate person in his family and has certainly mastered his words in poetry – one … Read more

Interview: Claire Barker

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Claire Barker Head Shot

Claire is author of the Knitbone Pepper books, a series about a funny, friendly family of ghost animals who reside at crumbling Starcross Hall. Claire and Knitbone recently won the Simply Books X Factor award, voted for by 2,000 children, and were shortlisted for the Sainsburys Children’s Fiction Award in 2017.  We’ve recently been visiting schools with Claire, who read to over 1000 children in just 3 days, and ran a hugely successful writer’s workshop at CCB. We asked Claire the … Read more

Costa Book Awards 2017

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Costa Book Award Category Winners

Book-world always begins the year promptly, as on the 2nd of January the Costa Book Awards 2017 category winners are announced. There are awards for five categories; First Novel, Novel, Children’s Book, Poetry and Biography. The Costa Book Awards have been running since 1971 and in 1985 an overall winners award was introduced. Last years winner, Sebastian Barry, was the first author to win Book of the Year twice for 2016’s Days Without End. The overall winner will be announced on … Read more